Storage Management: The Compliance Effect, Part 1

A never-ending issue facing storage managers is trying to get the resources needed to make their systems run more efficiently. In fact, it’s almost the same situation that networking managers found themselves in during the mid-sixties. Good news for storage management has arrived in the form of new data retention laws handed down by the federal government. The bad news for storage managers, however, are those same data retention laws handed down by the federal government.

According to Lou Harvey, technical business architect with Maranti Networks, even with the compliance laws laid out, IT organizations must have both manual and automated process models in place in order to: support and secure the regulated source records; be able to retain, recover, and show explicit audit trail creation of each class of record and its lifecycle governance (retention and destruction processes); and have the ability to retrieve and manage security and access within multiple layers of storage and business processes.

“The challenge is that many source documents originate on today’s laptops or desktops through email or office application tools, and may not find their way into the data center scope for days, weeks, or months, ” says Harvey. “This creates corporate risk and liability.”

Harvey says that as a result of these challenges, IT organizations need to extend their ‘must have’ list to include multi-vendor storage management, multi-layer storage retention, and multi-application data sourced governance through the use of automated document retention and protection-based solutions.

Jon Toor, director of product marketing at OnStor, says that regulatory compliance will bring increased standardization to record keeping. “Document retention and retention of electronic communications were previously managed in very diverse ways, ranging from the very structured to the somewhat ad-hoc.” According to Toor, disaster recovery planning was viewed by some IT managers as a ‘must have,’ and by others as a ‘nice to have.’ “Compliance will drive more companies to implement robust data management to ensure that data is both protected and quickly recoverable.”